


Like Diamonds in Space

by seor1324333



Category: Gintama
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mentions of Slavery, Self-Hatred, because you know mutsu was captain of a slaving ship at first, i should've rewatched their meeting episode before writing but, one day i will learn how to draft
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 18:34:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21703096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seor1324333/pseuds/seor1324333
Summary: A retelling of Mutsu and Sakamoto's first meeting, and their ensuing relationship. Mutsu POV-centric. A lot of character analysis.He draws people to him, she realizes, like moths to a flame, only he doesn’t burn them to crisps, but shares his heat, transfers his vision to others so that they take it in and spread it out, like butterflies unfurling their wings. She’s drawn to him too, all quiet simmering and repressed longing for an existence she never knew could be hers, but by the time she’s realized what he’s done, it’s too late.
Relationships: Mutsu/Sakamoto Tatsuma
Kudos: 18





	Like Diamonds in Space

Mutsu wakes up to the sound of gunfire and muffled screams. 

She’s up in a second, brain already caught up to her senses so that she’s just as alert as she would be had she actually gotten enough sleep for once. If there’s one thing her father did good by her, it was training his daughter to be prepared, at any time, any place, to fight for her life. And by the sounds of the thumping footsteps coming down the hall towards her room, this would be one of those fights her father had prepared her for.

Her assailants are four of the cargo ( _the people_ , whispers a small voice inside her head), armed with two guns between them they’d taken off some guards and a butcher’s knife probably from the kitchens. She dispatches them of their shoddy weapons with a few well-aimed kicks, swivelling behind one woman to lock her in a chokehold. They’re all taller than her, bigger than her, but even at the ripe young age of fourteen, there is no one who can match Mutsu’s battle prowess.

No one on the ship at least. But Mutsu likes to think that she would give even other Yatos, her father, cause to pause. 

Humans however, even had Mutsu not trained her entire life to be a warrior ( _a slaving warrior_ ), stand no chance against her. She’s shot two with the gun she’d appropriated from their appropriating grasps, the woman under her hold slowly dying of choked gasps, and when the last man charges at her with a reckless hopelessness, he soon joins his conspirators, leaving Mutsu alone.

She promptly shoots each corpse a second time, just to be sure, and sweeps out into the halls to assess her forces.

She does not need to change. She is always dressed, equipped, prepared for war. Even though this attack hardly counts as _war_ , as slaver guards quickly assemble their forces after their initial surprise, leaving Mutsu to issue orders and gather reports.

This is not the first time the human cargo attempt to throw off their chains. This will not be the last.

The next uprising comes, in a way that Mutsu could never have predicted.

In the midst of it all is one man. The first thing she notices about him is just how clear and blue his eyes are. His gaze roams over his surroundings, his captors and their weapons pointed at him, and lands on Mutsu moving through the ranks to stand before him. 

He smiles, brilliant and unguarded, and Mutsu is filled with an unbidden urge to knock that smile off his face. 

“Thanks so much for savin’ me, ahahaha. You have no idea how terrible it is to be stuck in a haystack floatin’ in space. It’s not like I’m some elastic pirate searching to become pirate king, ahahaha. Say, this is a nice ship you have. I can tell by the engines thrumming just how well ya treat her. Say, did you have any food on hand? I’m mighty starvin’, it’s all that hibernatin’ in space you do…”

She hates how open he looks. She hates how kind his voice is. How curious and artless and unjaded he appears. He looks older than her, by a few years at least. How could he remain so cheerful and undaunted in the midst of slaving aliens?

“Ahahahaha,” he laughs when she threatens to keelhaul him in the middle of space.

“Ahahaha,” he laughs again, as Mutsu looks on impassively as one of the guards hits him with the butt of his rifle. 

“Ahahaha,” he keeps laughing, talking and joking with his captors as they ship him off under Mutsu’s orders to the cells where the other slaves are held. 

Mutsu’s hand clenches and unclenches, and her guards hurry to clear the way for her as she pushes down the urge to throttle a laughing, gregarious man. 

She’s still irrationally angry when she makes her way down to the cells a day and a half later. Mutsu is a hands-on leader, learning from her father that the best way to ensure your underlings’ loyalty is to remind them, in person, that you see and hear everything they’re doing. The guards straighten up as she walks by, and Mutsu almost does a switch-turn when the sound of boisterous laughter comes floating down the hall. 

It’s been a day and a half, Mutsu thinks, as she forces herself to approach the end of the hall where most of her prisoners are held. It’s been less than two days, so why is it that the slaves actually look bright, almost cheerful, almost _hopeful_ , for once?

She knows the answer before she even thinks the question. 

He’s there in the middle of a circle of humans, the slaves in the other pens leaning against their bars as if he’s fire, and they can’t get enough of his warmth. He faces the door, but turns his head so that he doesn’t exclude those behind him. He’s smiling and laughing and joking with them, his eyes creased with mirth, as if he has no worries and all the time in the world. 

Mutsu clenches her fist. She digs her nails into her palm. 

It’s also then that he notices her, and somewhere in the back of her mind Mutsu realizes that his senses are too sharp, too quick, for him to be a human civilian.

“Hiya Mutsu!” he waves at her. “Or is it Captain Mutsu? I’d call you Captain Yato but that’s more of your clan name rather than a family name in the way I’m familiar with, right?” 

There’s no hint of mockery in his tone, which only makes it worse. 

The other humans still, shrink almost, and the warm mood of camaraderie immediately dissipates, only to be replaced by haunted looks and swallowed breaths.

The man, if he notices, only continues to greet Mutsu as if they were long-time friends. 

“I’m Sakamoto Tatsuma, I realize we didn’t get a chance to introduce ourselves earlier. The guards here were accommodating enough to tell me who you are, and from the respectful way they talk about you I’m sure you run a tight ship, captain. Ahahahaha. Grabulster here says he’s been serving under you for two years now. I can barely remember the shenanigans I got into when I was your age, ahahaha, never mind running my own ship. You have my admiration, captain.”

Mutsu looks at the two guards posted at Sakamoto’s cell doors, and realizes she does not know either of their names. She narrows her eyes, and they visibly gulp, one inadvertently trying to take a step back into the cell bars behind her. Mutsu turns back to the smiling man, realizing that he was redirecting her attention to where he wanted it, and was succeeding at doing so tremendously. 

She’s disconcerted by all accounts, but if there’s one thing she’s good at, it’s masking her emotions into a schooled, stoic look. So why does she feel her facial muscles tremoring, straining to keep her anger in check?

“You seem to be adjusting to your accommodations rather nicely,” she blurts out, surprising herself at just how easy it is to slip into a near banter when she’s feeling so uncomfortable. He grins at her, lopsidedly. At least he’s not laughing that obnoxious laugh of his.

“I’m a merchant, you see, so adaptation’s all part of the schtick. In a way you and I are much alike, wouldn’t you say?”

“How so?” Mutsu asks, even as her mind reels. Is he comparing himself to a murdering, slaving alien? There’s got to be a limit to his compassion, right?

Sakamoto’s smile softens, and something inside Mutsu _clenches_ , threatening to choke the breath out of her. She hates it. She can’t get enough of it.

“We’re both good at judging the value of merchandise, and the depth and breadth of people, don’tcha think?” 

Mutsu’s eyes narrow.

“So how much would you judge to be the value of the _merchandise_ around you?”

Sakamoto looks at the humans around him, heads bowed and eyes averted, and if he noticed her spitting out the word “merchandise”, he makes no show of it.

“Like a rock,” he says, softly, and Mutsu finds herself leaning in to make sure she’d caught that right. 

“A rock?” she repeats, feeling stupid and hating herself even more because of it. 

“A rock,” he nods. “Each and every one of us a rock.”

He does not meet her eyes, instead turning back to his human compatriots, and Mutsu leaves, feeling as if she’d been dismissed from a conversation she should have been heading in the first place.

  
  


She expects gunshots. She expects shouting. She expects the thump of corpses on the ground and the feel of flesh collapsing in as she kicks and punches her way through a mountain of bodies. There is none of that, no violence, no uprising in the way she’s used to, all proverbial pitchforks and eyes filled with murderous intent. Instead, rebellion creeps in through the pearly-white cracks of a mercantile smile, words of sedition and dissent riding in on the waves of a boisterous, obnoxious laugh. She should’ve seen it coming. She does see it coming, notices from the moment she’d gone to check on her prisoners how they seemed lighter, more buoyant, sunken faces lighting up in a way that no prisoner should have the right to. She knew it was him at the centre of it all, and try though she might, she cannot help but be pulled into the periphery of Sakamoto’s charm.

Perhaps that is why she felt so unsettled talking to him. She was angry at him, wanted nothing more than to reach out and tear out that kindly smile from his face, that smile that spoke of trust and growth and dare she think it? Redemption? Who was he, to offer her all this? Who was he, to make her want to project all her self-loathing and desires, especially when they’d just met?

But no, what she wanted even more than to hurt this man who brought life to those around him was to dig into her own palms and rip out her offending flesh for being the way it was. The way it was created. The way her father nurtured and beat into the seed of his own blood, so that it would sprout into his like image, another Yato bent on destruction, domination, death. Fighting is all Mutsu’s ever known. In fact, the years as captain of her own slaving ship were some of the least exciting years of her life. There was no challenge from her enslaved opponents, no thrill in marching down hallways and looking over inventory ledgers day in, day out. And as if the universe wanted to laugh at her pathetic existence, it’d sent this human, this Sakamoto Tatsuma, who smiles at her without a single trace of fear even with a dozen gun barrels pointing at his head, who speaks to her as charmingly as he would to a potential investor, and who now looks at her, gaze measured but with no trace of judgement, and offers her a crooked, boyish smile. 

Of course she’d found herself back at the slave cells. The guards seem just as surprised as she doesn’t feel, and they struggle to recover quickly even as she waves them aside and tells them to leave. 

No one questions their Yato captain, but from the looks of it, the other human captives look like they wished someone had, so that they wouldn’t have to be alone with their captor. 

Mutsu ignores the bodies pretending to sleep, her attention zeroed in on the human in front of her. 

“You’re a businessman,” she starts without preamble. “Tell me, how would you go about selling the lives of your companions for your own freedom?”

His smile falters, but his gaze does not.

“For the price of a rock?” she continues, feeling both pleased and sick at what she’s trying to do. And what is she trying to do? Get a rise out of him? Make him angry, afraid for once, force him to show the hatred he’s no doubt harbouring for this alien who took him and so many of his species captive? 

Mutsu does not know, and she hates not knowing. She does not know how to stop now that she’s started, and she doesn’t know if she wants to stop even if she could. 

Sakamoto still looks at her, smile still gone, and Mutsu turns around feeling as if she’d both won and lost something she could never get back. Something she didn’t know she even wanted for the longest time. But it’s his voice that stops her in her tracks, and his choice of words that makes her clench her hand so tight she can feel her nails tearing into her flesh.

“I wasn’t always a merchant,” he says quietly, the only noise in the space around them apart from the fabricated silence of dozens of breaths being held and bodies being forced into stillness. “Well I was, was born into a business-runnin’ family, but I was a soldier too. A warrior, like you. Fought in a war that went over my head where every day I traded the lives of my companions for a price that is far too precious, far too mundane, than a mere, magnificent rock. I saw friends cut down like boulders being split by pickaxes. I saw friends crumble into granite dust. And, I saw friends harden from the pressure of rivers of blood, until they would either crack into insignificance or bloom into the brightest of all rocks. 

You asked how I would go about selling my companions for my freedom? I offer you a counter-offer. For the price of a diamond per head, and the ship’s weight in diamonds, I offer to buy this ship and all its slaves from you. You might be thinking that that’s too good of a deal, that no one would offer that many diamonds for a pirate ship and some valueless cargo, but where you see mundane stone I see diamonds in the making. 

These people have potential, Captain Mutsu. All they need is for someone to take them off their shelf and polish them until they’re gleaming brighter than any star in the sky. Let me be the merchant here. Let me be the customer.” _Let me save them,_ she hears, but does not hear him say. 

Mutsu is glad her back is facing the humans, and that the guards are nowhere to be seen. She’s glad there’s no one alive to see the look on her face. 

She forces a step forward, and then another, and then another. She cannot walk fast enough. She cannot walk slow enough.

She feels as if there’s a mountain of rocks weighing down her heels, just waiting for her to stumble so they can collapse and bury her in their avalanche. 

He said rocks could turn into diamonds with potential? He was wrong. Mutsu would never be anything but a monstrous, loathsome Yato.


End file.
